honest words on honest music

10/03/201010/03/2010

Reflections : Music of the Superheroes

In Allan Moore‘s classic comic book series, Watchmen, written in 1986-87 and recently adopted into a film, directed by Zack Snyder, we come upon the story’s main antagonist, named Adrian Veidt. Going by the name Ozymandias, Veidt retires from the superhero work, devoting his attention to running his own enterprises… At the end of the eleventh issue, we read a fictional interview between Dough Roth of Nova Express and Adrian Veidt, and stumble upon the following:

NOVA: Changing the subject entirely, do you listen to much music? I wondered what your taste might be, as a superhero…

VEIDT: I like electronic music…

OK… Do I have your attention now? Yes… A super hero villain likes electronic music. But that’s not all… Read the rest of the interview, and keep in mind that this was written in 1986:

VEIDT: I like eletronic music. That’s a very superhero-ey thing to like, I suppose, isn’t it? I like avant-garde music in general. Cage, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Andrew Lang, Pierre Henry. Terry Riley is very good. Oh, and I’ve heard some interesting new music from Jamaica… a sort of hybrid between electronic music and reggae […]

What what what??? Could it be that Allan Moore is looking into the music of the future, and is describing dubstep??? Seriously???

VEIDT: […] It’s a fascinating study in musical forms generated when a largely pre-technological culture is given access to modern recording techniques without the technological preconceptions that we’ve allowed to accumulate, limiting our vision. It’s called dub music. You’d like it, I’m sure…

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3 thoughts on “Reflections : Music of the Superheroes”

I would like to point that in 1984-novel “Neuromancer”, by William Gibson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer), a rastafarian crew of a space-ships listen constantly to dub music… but the novel is set in an undetermined future, and I wonder (Gibson is never specific describing the music’s style, as far as I can remember) if dub music in the future the novelist creates is a kind of mix of the classic dub and other electronic sounds (all of us imagine a future full of electronic sounds and music).

I have read the novel 2 times… and now I would like to check this out. It would be no problem, because this book is absolutely amazing. By the way, if you didn’t read this masterpiece before, I highly recommend it to you :)

Well… he was… for sure… And dub, growing out of Jamaica in the late 60s was the ‘electronic music’ of the day… but what grew out of dub in the future became known as the jungle, garage, drum’n’bass, and finally dubstep. I suppose I want to give Moore a bit more credit for pushing these ideas further even then ;)